Ellen Pao, a former junior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who filed a lawsuit last year against her employer alleging gender discrimination and retaliation, is joining Reddit.

Ellen Pao
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Shefiled a lawsuit against the legendary venture capital firm alleging having suffered retaliation after rebuffing sexual advances from senior partners. She also claimed that Kleiner Perkins discriminated against her and other female employees when it came to promotions and pay. Kleiner Perkins has denied all of Pao's allegations, which made for quite a number of Peyton Place comes to Silicon Valley headlines when they first hit.

A long-time lurker, Ellen comes to us by way of a long, adventurous career spanning venture capital, business development, law, and electrical engineering. She's been a formal and informal advisor to reddit for more than a year, and recently decided to finally join us full-time. She'll be working on helping us build strategic partnerships that benefit the community. Here's Ellen in her own words:

"I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, raised by enginerds on Star Wars, computers and books. I live in San Francisco, via New York City, Boston and Hong Kong. I've worked with dozens of tech companies, traveling to eleven countries on five continents, to help build a variety of consumer and business platform companies. My favorite subreddits are /r/IAmA and /r/pareidolia (I like people even when they're not real). Being part of a community of people who care is inspiring and energizing. reddit has so much to offer so many people, and I'm excited to find partners to help make reddit even more awesome."

The past few months (and Monday) have been a time of unprecedented growth for reddit, and we'd like to thank everyone who's reading this for your support, whether that happens to be by contributing interesting new posts, buying ads or reddit gold, sharing reddit with your friends, or moderating one of the thousands and thousands of unique subreddits. Verily, through all our efforts, reddit shall continue on its course to its destiny uninterrupted.

About the author

Charles Cooper was an executive editor at CNET News. He has covered technology and business for more than 25 years, working at CBSNews.com, the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet.
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